It’s time to take the Muppets away from Disney

Hello, Popculturology pals. Welcome to this week’s edition of the Friday newsletter.

If you’re ever famous enough to appear on GQ’s “10 Essentials” web series, what are you picking as your essentials? I appreciate that Buffalo Bills quarterback Josh Allen stuck to the show’s script and picked things like watches and headphones.

Ohmigod, you just play the music and you light the lights!

After decades of stops and starts, Disney finally figured out how to make the beloved Muppets franchise work in today’s world. It turns out that the classic format of The Muppet Show was the perfect format all along.

The Muppet Show was met with instant praise from fans. “I loved this special. It was simple. It didn’t overthink the Muppets,” I wrote back in February. “It reached all the way back to Jim Henson’s original vision for The Muppet Show, understanding that what worked back during the original series run in the 1970s and 1980s could work in 2026.”

The Muppet Show won several Emmys last week, including Sabrina Carpenter for her guest appearance on the Disney+ special, sparking a new wave of people to ask, “why haven’t there been more new episodes of The Muppet Show?”

The future of the Muppets has never been more clear. Unless you’re Disney.

“Seven months, millions of views and four Emmys later, there has been no pickup” of The Muppet Show as a series, Deadline reported on Thursday. “There have been difficulties cracking a premise for an ongoing Muppet Show series that Disney (Disney+ and 20th TV), The Muppets Studio and [Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s production company] will all be on board for.”

The premise is The Muppet Show. You just do THE MUPPET SHOW.

It blows my mind that Disney spent decades trying to figure out how they should use the Muppets, and after it after it turned out the answer was to just “do The Muppet Show,” everyone over there is like, “But what should the premise of The Muppet Show be?"

It’s. The. Muppet. Show. The premise is — Fozzie Bear with me here — THE MUPPET SHOW.

At this point, we should consider petitioning a court to issue an order taking the Muppets away from Disney and giving them to anyone else who understands how The Muppet Show works.

If Disney can’t figure this extremely simple concept out, I have zero faith they’re ever going to get rights sorted on A Muppet Family Christmas.

‼️ THE BIG STORIES

“This isn’t Godzilla we’re talking about”

We got a wildly confident new trailer for Godzilla Minus Zero this week. Seriously. This preview for writer/director/special effects wizard Takashi Yamazaki’s sequel to Godzilla Minus One absolutely knows that it has a monster hit on its hands. We’re getting his version of King Ghidorah, aren’t we? The yellow lightning. The roar. The fact that this is Godzilla Minus ZERO and Ghidorah has gone by Monster ZERO? (Watch)

Netflix goes on a $1M Binge

When I started to read the report about paying $1 million for a 23-page short story, I thought that was crazy. Then I read a bit more and realized that Nicholas Binge was the author of that short story. The same Nicholas Binge who wrote Dissolution, my favorite book of 2025. (He also wrote the stellar Ascension.)